Max Yergan

by Anthony, David Henry, III;

  Yergan wanted to place the WSCF firmly on a platform of nonracial internationalism. Doing so was not consonant with the organization’s Eurocentric leadership, which had little feeling for the world beyond Europe’s borders, save as adjunct to Christian civilization. In any case, fewer still could accept that there may have been any lessons worth learning from these backward, backwater areas. In his own way, then, Yergan threatened their hegemony. This shows in his memorandum’s concluding point:

  (4) Finally I pointed out that if the movements of Europe feel it necessary to act in concert some of us at least in other parts of the world cannot afford to be cut off or to be out of anything that affects us so vitally as theological and international trends in Europe. A case in point is the relationship between Europe and Africa. In every way politically and economically and certainly in the religious realm, Africa has been tremendously influenced by Europe, and this will continue to be the case for many, many years. In view of this we in Africa desire to see Europe’s point of view influenced as largely as possible by other sections of the Christian family, namely, the East as well as America. For this reason I have favoured a council which would attend to minor routine and administrative questions common to the European movements. But in regard to larger theological and international questions my view is that what is required is an all European conference emphasizing of course the questions and difficulties of the European movements, and kept within reasonable size, but organized to be representative of the entire Federation, in order that it might serve the entire Federation and in turn to be served by those parts of the Federation outside of Europe.

  Porter’s response was diplomatic in the extreme. Noting the importance of this communication, he replied that he felt “glad” Yergan was “keeping in touch with Francis,” stressing that “we must continue to uphold his hands.” Sharing a few items of current WSCF and International Student Service interest, he closed with a soft but unsubtle admonition for staff to close ranks:

  We must continue to think together on various points of the Federation policy. A guiding principle in the European Council will be what will facilitate their work, and at the same time, not interfere with total Federation loyalty.26

  The following two months brought with them complications in the health of the Yergan family. In April, their eldest son, Frederick, was bedridden, struck down with what appeared to be appendicitis. Ever the missionary, Yergan rationalized that this was “rather hard, but it is a part of the price one must pay for our privilege in Africa.”27 In mid-June, Fort Hare principal Alexander Kerr, responding to a request for information concerning Yergan, submitted references to the Alice magistrate and to the Government Trade Commissioner.28 Later on in the month Max also revealed that, learning of Susie Yergan’s mother’s illness, he and Susie had decided that she would travel to the States by late July, leaving their three children in his care, an unprecedented parenting experience for Yergan.29

  Yergan demurred upon receipt of Porter’s May letter, agreeing “with Francis that the period immediately before us is one within which much of the future policy will be settled” and emphasizing that he was “in full accord with your desire that we give him every help possible and hold up his hands in every way.”30 But this may have also been a tactical retreat. Yergan could not press on single-handedly; he needed movement allies. At the moment, he had his hands full, taking care of the children alone for the first time. He had just returned from the extreme north of South Africa, at the border of the Limpopo River separating it from Southern Rhodesia. These travels made him even more anxious to share his knowledge.

  The South African elections of July 1929 gave Yergan much to think about, prompting him to reestablish contact with NAACP leader Mary White Ovington. Informing her of the Nationalist Party victory, Yergan detailed the effect of the elections upon the people with whom he worked most closely:

  As a result of the elections Africans are more discouraged than I have observed them to be in a long time. In my recent travels I have discussed the situation with a number of our leaders and I find that they share this general discouragement. Running through it all, however, there is a gleam of optimism. There is a growing consciousness that our way is to be a long and hard one in view of the new circumstances which obtain here as elsewhere in Africa, as a result of historical processes of the past century or so. Personally I have encouraged this point of view on the part of some of the leaders at least for I am convinced that we have simply got to dig ourselves in and lay as solid a foundation as possible. This of course is very complicated, for how can one lay a foundation when one is by law prevented from buying land or selling one’s labour wherever one desires, or when one is denied facilities for advanced education, or even good elementary education as is the case here with a few exceptions? It is a recognition of these facts which leads me to say that there are many other approaches to the solution of our difficulties, for instance, the approach by way of labour organization, political education and organization, and doubtless other ways and I never withhold any help or encouragement that I can give to my friends here who are undertaking to deal with our situation from these points of view. I wish you could be here to use it all, get the threads of it for yourself, help us understand it and use your pen about it.31

  Yergan’s reference to a “growing consciousness that our way is to be a long and hard one in view of the new circumstances which obtain here as elsewhere in Africa as a result of historical processes of the past century or so” is subject to varying interpretations. In a direct historical sense the remark may refer to the manner in which the vast majority of Africans lost control of their land to Europe. This did occur roughly within the period of the preceding one hundred years, with some distinction depending upon the area under consideration. But it is also the case that the time frame Yergan referred to saw the emergence of several movements trying to improve conditions for working people. One effort, with which Ovington would have been quite familiar, was the trend toward socialism, to which Yergan may equally as well have been alluding. This movement could attract religious as well as secular radicals, each of which type could be encountered within South Africa; indeed, scores of radicals were both. The key to finding comrades lay in reaching impressionably youthful elements, who had the energy to battle over the long haul. And it is precisely such a group of young militants that Yergan describes thus:

  The most encouraging development that I can write you about has to do with the youth of this land both European as well as African. I have just come back from visits to two of the large University Colleges for Europeans at Johannesburg and Bloemfontein. At each of these places I had a very cordial reception and while all of the people did not agree with my point [of view] they were at least more or less open minded and were willing to discuss questions from a factual basis. In October I am going to have 30 or 40 European students at the South African Native College for a three or four day conference, where we shall give more time to a discussion of the economic and general social aspects of the Racial question here with the hope that we may discover a number of ways whereby there may take place much more cooperation between African and European students.

  While the impact of Yergan’s solitary activities may easily be overstated, it is vital to give them the weight they merit. Yergan had been active in the Joint Council, as well as in the SCM and its SCA and YMCA affiliates, and posted himself advantageously at Fort Hare. He was thus part of a circle that included teachers and heads not only of Native training institutions of the Cape and Natal but also of the many Whites-only schools and colleges in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, the heart of Afrikanerdom, to which over time he gained entry. On several occasions he appeared before crowds of students, faculty, and staff at such institutions, to great effect, if he and others are to be believed.32 Perhaps it was his unique status as a “foreign Native” that made it possible to extend courtesies to him which homegrown Africans, irrespective of their accomplishments, were not permitt
ed. Nevertheless, his positive reception reinforced his faith in the power of inter-racial work.

  It is also evident from his letter to Ovington that he was in no way shy about how his work might be regarded, particularly with respect to its interracial dimension. Here he pulls no punches when informing Ovington about what he contemplated for the next year:

  In June of next year we are planning for a large National Conference to be attended by 150 well chosen African students from all over the Union of South Africa as well as Basutoland, Bechuanaland and perhaps Southern Rhodesia. There will also be present 50 European students and about 30 teachers both European and African. The conference will therefore be interracial. It will also undertake to deal with two questions in a rather comprehensive way: (1) What is the real content of the Christian Gospel for the life of Bantu students and people today? (2) What sort of future have Bantu students and people a right to look forward to, and what is the nature of the cooperation that they have a right to expect from Christian Europeans? While we shall emphasize the religious basis of this conference, we shall in every way seek to place equal emphasis upon the whole question of implicating Christian principles in every realm of life. Our conference therefore is bound to be of a radical nature, and, I hope, of far reaching consequences.

  Yergan also informed Ovington of the larger plans on which he had been working. They had been broached in prior grant proposals to Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Phelps Stokes and were now outlined in their fullest dimensions. Yergan wrote Ovington about an idea similar to rural YMCA work done in America, but closer to that of India and Korea, which sought to combine social, religious, and economic needs. In a three-step process, he had embarked upon organizing a national committee to help advise him on the project, doing field investigation and starting to train selected African youth in a social service regime.

  What I am most anxious to do is to station in parts of the country a number of young, well chosen men with a social passion and vision and with definite ideas and methods for realizing their vision. Our task is nothing less than reconstructing the foundation for the life which the years ahead of us will demand. That to me is one of the tragedies which our people in South Africa and I fear all over Africa are facing and will increasingly face. Whether we like it or not, and I am sure we do not like it, we are passing through a period not unprecedented in the history of Europe and perhaps not in parts of the Far East, whereby strong forces from without are crowding in upon us in such an overwhelming way that it is impossible for us to withstand them on the basis of our own indigenous strength social, economic or political. The inescapable observation to be made all over Africa today is that the social fabric of this continent is breaking under the impact of Europe politically and America, Europe and Asia economically. There is much talk of the desirability of our not becoming Westernized. But this process is [already] taking place everyday as witness the rapid progress which is being made in political and economic developments here, and as witness the break down in African home life, in the larger social spheres and in the true inwardness of African religious life which in times past was related to and controlled almost every act of the individual African as well as the life of the tribe. I have stated all of this in order to let you see how involved the situation here is and consequently how complicated our task is. In spite of all I have said above, however, the way that I am trying to follow is quite clear and I propose to push on.

  As the American autumn began, Susie Wiseman Yergan, back state-side on family business, spoke to students at Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, in October 1929. Sounding a note that would resonate loudly among YMCA and YWCA partisans, she excoriated the infamous tot system whereby African workers were remunerated partly in alcohol. Later on the Black press quoted her as saying, “The liquor traffic is playing havoc with some Africans. In some of the rural districts [where] wages are exceedingly low, some of the men receive only so many drinks of wine for their labor.” Wiseman Yergan hammered home the problems of morality, economics, hygiene, disease, and poverty, further stating that “one of the paramount problems is to take care of the rural people and especially the non-student group. We are hoping soon to have out there people who are doing the same type of work as your farm demonstration agents. There is plenty of work for them to do.”33

  The final year of the 1920s brought Yergan both renown and disappointment. The reputation his work achieved, both inside South Africa and beyond it in Europe and North America, brought acclaim; by June, for instance, he was already planning for a monumental Fort Hare interracial conference slated to take place the following year. On the other hand, there remained profound limits to what he as one individual, even “exceptional,” American Negro could do. It was clear, for example, that in spite of having at one time met with a number of influential leading figures in the South African YMCA movement, and after seven years of touring and seemingly ceaseless sermonizing before audiences of every conceivable description, the lily-white, separatist nature of the “European” Y movement stubbornly remained intact, with Native and “Coloured” branches on their own. Though he was allied with the system, Yergan’s frustration was growing.

  The same year saw the reintroduction of the acts of Parliament that had been tried by the Pact government to further dilute the already tepid participation of Nonwhites in political, social, and legal arenas. The effect upon Yergan of these apparently irresistible trends would be great, yet another test of his mettle as a dedicated racial adjuster. Why was he faced with the task of adjusting? Why could not others try to adjust themselves and their own aspirations to fit the needs of building life cooperatively? Was that not the object of Christianity?

  Further evidence of Yergan’s uneasiness with the state of affairs in 1929 came in his reactions to several talks delivered in England late that year by General Jan C. Smuts. After his general electoral defeat of that year, Smuts accepted the invitation of the Oxford University Rhodes Trust to revisit his alma mater as part of its lecture series. During November, General Smuts presented six public addresses. As Yergan’s reply was dated shortly after the second address, it was probably a response to either the first, on “African Settlement,” or the second, on “Native Policy,” but it was equally as likely a response to both together. Smuts’s first talk praised Africa’s white rulers, extolling Afrikaner virtues while identifying two rival schools of thought on African development: the imperialist, represented by Cecil Rhodes; and the humanitarian, exemplified by colonization’s liberal critics, like Lord Olivier. Separating them, Smuts shared his personal viewpoint on Native character. For him Africans possessed many virtues, but required firm supervision to find and stay on a straight and narrow path. He thought Africans lacked initiative, were happy-go-lucky, were easily satisfied, had little foresight, and were good subordinates when led by masterful white employers.34

  For Smuts, the solution to the Native “problem” was to recognize how to respond to the Native’s specific characteristics by providing needed guidance to allow efficient production to occur, while limiting external influences that would add stress to societies already suffering the ravages of industrialization, by “allowing them to develop along their own separate lines.” The reasons behind Smuts’s statement were logically spelled out in his second Oxford address about “Native Policy,” where he claimed that “the negro and the negroid Bantu form a distinct human type which the world would be poorer without,” proclaiming the infantile features of Africans in psychology and outlook.35

  Having thus painted a portrait that dovetailed neatly with his earlier address on African settlement, Smuts took his conceit of the reputedly easygoing, uncomplicated aspects of “Negroid” demeanor to what he considered its logical conclusion, which was that “wine, women, and song” were valued by Africans, but they lacked art, literature, and religion.36

  In Smuts’s schema, the essential differences in culture and mentality that separated Africans from Europeans needed to be recognized i
n distinctive approaches to policies governing the two. Incorrect application of policy could lead to a situation whereby an African might be “de-Africanized” and turned either into “a beast of the field or into a pseudo-European.” Smuts argued that this had occurred as a result of the ways in which Africans had been treated in the past, first as subhuman and then as equal.37 This was a phenomenon that other Europeans often called “detribalization.”

  Smuts, portraying himself as reasonable and progressive and cloaking himself in the garb of a protector of African institutions (not unlike colonial contemporaries in British-, French-, Belgian-, and Portuguese-ruled Africa), was really outlining a plan of marginalization and unprecedented restriction. As he emphasized fostering development along separate lines, the larger purpose of his theory came into focus. The climax of his presentation was reached when he considered the end of policy to be the creation of “separate political institutions for the two” i.e., territorial and institutional segregation.

  Smuts was proposing nothing less than turning back the clock on the very social processes that had produced the “school people” who exercised limited but powerful symbolic authority as educated exemplars of ways of life fertilized by the Afro-European encounter. While pretending the opposite, Smuts would arrest this development, dividing rural folk from their urban counterparts by emphasizing African traditional life over Western education.38